I have had an idea in my head for a long time, but really hadn’t had the time to organize those thoughts and ideas into an article. So, imagine my surprise today when I stumbled this article which in many ways puts voice to exactly what I wanted to say. Any way, I shall present the article with no further comment, it largely speaks for itself.

September 16, 2013
The Impostor President Gets Caught
By Jack Cashill

During the 2008 presidential campaign, the New York Times ran an article on what psychologists call the “impostor phenomenon.” To measure it, they ask test subjects questions like, “At times, I feel my success has been due to some kind of luck” or “I can give the impression that I’m more competent than I really am.”

Although the article had nothing to do with Barack Obama, he would surely have scored off the charts had he answered those questions honestly. He was a reasonably bright guy but not the “brilliant” author and savant white liberals thought him to be. His “luck” derived from the fact that he grew up almost exactly as those liberals had but in the body of a black man. Hearing him they heard themselves. Seeing him say what he said surprised them, validated them, delighted them with its very whiteness. Although they would be the last to admit it, they suffered conspicuously from what George Bush has called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

In speaking of Obama in early 2007, Joe Biden framed those expectations with dunderheaded clarity. “I mean you got the first mainstream African-American presidential candidate who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Not to be out-patronized, Senate majority Leader Harry Reid found comfort in Obama’s having “no Negro dialect.” The always-observant Shelby Steele summed up the phenomenon, “Blacks like Obama, who show merit where mediocrity is expected, enjoy a kind of reverse stigma, a slightly inflated reputation for ‘freshness’ and excellence because they defy expectations.”

Throughout his ascendancy, Obama has had to fake something else besides competence, namely a belief in America. This trumpery was on full display during Tuesday night’s Syria speech. “When, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act,” said Obama at the conclusion of his disjointed speech on September 10. “That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional.”

Exceptional? As Russia’s Vladimir Putin promptly made clear in a taunting New York Times op-ed, Obama did not believe in American exceptionalism any more than he did. Indeed, Putin’s old KGB pals had been working to undermine that belief since the agency’s creation.

Obama’s rise was, in no small part, a testament to the KGB’s success. From his childhood on, Obama had been learning that just about the only thing exceptional about America was Barack Hussein Obama. In Hawaii, his communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, reinforced his mother’s casual anti-Americanism. “You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained,” Davis reportedly told Obama. “They’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit.”

Obama drank deeply from Davis’s well. In his acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama described the Americanization of Hawaii in Marxist terms as an “ugly conquest.” Missionaries brought “crippling diseases.” American companies carved up “the rich volcanic soil” and worked their indentured laborers of color “from sunup to sunset.”

After hitting the mainland Obama surrounded himself with Davis’s spiritual heirs. “I chose my friends carefully,” he wrote in Dreams. “The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.” With his new friends, Obama discussed “neocolonialism, Franz (sic) Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy” and flaunted his alienation. Dr. John Drew has confirmed that the Obama he met at Occidental College was a “Marxist planning for a Communist style revolution.”

The literary influences Obama cited include radical anti-imperialists like Fanon and Malcolm X, communists like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and tyrant-loving fellow travelers like W.E.B. DuBois. “Joseph Stalin was a great man,” DuBois wrote upon Stalin’s death in 1953. “Few other men of the 20th century approach his stature.” In Dreams, Obama gave no suggestion that this reading was in any way problematic or a mere phase in his development. He moved on to no new school, embraced no new worldview.

In April 2009 in Strasbourg, France, in response to a question about America’s role in the world, Obama let that worldview slip through. “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism,” he said. In other words, he did not believe in American exceptionalism at all.

In these last few months, the world has seen what happens when an intellectual lightweight with no fixed principles beyond the vestigial Marxism of his youth faces off against an unscrupulous post-Marxist survivor like Putin. For those paying attention, it wasn’t hard to predict.

In 1975, when Obama was goofing off through his freshman year at an elite Hawaiian prep school, twenty-two year old Putin joined the KGB. The opportunistic Putin stayed with “the organs” until 1991 when he schemed his way out of the abortive KGB-backed putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev. “As soon as the coup began,” said Putin later, “I immediately decided which side I was on.” That same year Obama — in his own words, “someone who has undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career” — secured an unearned berth in the Ivy League at Columbia University,

In 1995, both Putin and Obama got political. The wily Putin, always one step ahead of the law, took control of the Saint Petersburg branch of the pro-government Our Home Is Russia political party. In 1995, terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers, recognizing Obama’s puppet potential, finished writing Obama’s memoir, got Obama appointed chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant, and held a fundraiser for his state senate run in his Chicago home.

For the next eighteen years, the resourceful Putin finessed his way through the occasionally lethal minefield of Russian politics. Obama meanwhile was wafted aloft by his own breezy rhetoric and the overheated passions of his deluded followers, including, unfortunately, most of the mainstream media.

When Putin shot Obama’s balloon down over Syria no one should have been surprised. As America first learned at Benghazi, you can fake your way through college, fake your way through the Senate, even fake your way through the presidency, but you can’t fake your way through a civil war in the Middle East.

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122 Responses to “The Impostor President Gets Caught From American Thinker” ( jump to bottom )

When Putin shot Obama’s balloon down over Syria no one should have been surprised. As America first learned at Benghazi, you can fake your way through college, fake your way through the Senate, even fake your way through the presidency, but you can’t fake your way through a civil war in the Middle East.

I don’t think Obama is faking, really. He is on al Qaeda’s side, and against the United States. That’s why he made the declaration yesterday that allows us to supply arms to terrorist organizations. Obama knows we are backing terrorists in Syria. He’s counting on that. America made a grievious error when we elected him President. We may never recover. We have never had an explicitly anti-American President before. Not even James Buchannan, who certainly had sympathy for the Confederates, was as explicitly anti-American as Obama. The good news is that Obama isn’t especially competant at it. He is doing his level best to wreck the country, but America is very resilliant. We may come though this to the other side. He hasn’t managed to get us in a ground war in Syria yet. He’s got three and a half more years of damage to do, though. He will have us over $20 trillion in debt by the end of his term, with a GDP of about $16 trillion, so not quite 150% GDP in debt. That is an enormous hole to try to dig out of. That, rather than Syria, is where he is likely to destroy us. We’ll have a debt to GDP ratio approaching that of Greece by the end of his second term. And there will be nobody to bail us out.

That is, unfortunately, the way things are in America today. We here at Blogmocracy are really plugged into the politicss of our time, but we are the are exceptions. The average voter last election couldn’t have told you that real unemployment was north of 11%, that the labor participation rate was as low as it was during the Carter Administration, or that GDP “growth”was practically flatlined. All of those things are true, and we here could have told them to you, but the average voter heard that Unemployment numbers were under 8%, the talismanic number that the Obama Administration chose to put out to argue that their man wasn’t a total failure. We simply can’t seem to get our side of the story out. A large part of that is the MFM. Look at how they’ve covered the shooting the other day. Lots of news outlets have claimed the shooter used an AR 15, when in fact he used a pump shotgun. Surer, all of these news outlets will print a retraction, but it won’t be in screaming 2″ bold font on their front page. I’d say the average American thinks the guy used an AR15. They lie deliberately, with malice aforethought. Fox news by itself isn’t enough to counter all the weight of the rest of the media. Blogs can get the information out there, but you have to know where to look and how to look. You need to be able to interpret the data once you find it. Most Americans do not have critical thinking skills. They don’t teach logic in high school anymore. Hell, they don’t necessarily teach reasoning and critical thinking skills to college graduates anymore. Dumbed down people are easier to control than informed rational people are. Again, with the shooting, they are going to make the focus of the day on the weapons used, rather than the fact that our mental health system completely missed committing a man who was hearing voices to a mental institution. What little we’ll hear about the mental health side of this will be lamenting that the guy wasn’t put on a list so that he couldn’t buy guns. This man was a danger to himself and to others. Worried about him buying a gun? Sure, but he could have done much the same thing with a machete. These people (unarmed victims) would have still been dead. Last tie I checked, someone hacked to death with a machete is just as dead as someone shot to death with an AR15. It is just the machete killings don’t push the political agenda that our media want to push. I don’t know what the answer is, frankly. The information is out there if people are willing to do a little work to get it, but people aren’t taught in school to be able to do this. Reasoning is a skill, one that requires constant practice to be good at it. The majority of Americans care more about Honey Boo Boo than they do the great matters of the day.

Actually, itwas a little worse than that. The Democrats rejected God three times, and then the Democrats showed their totalitarian mindset by overriding the clearly expressed views of their people. The chair recognized that having the Democrats reject God was bad optics, so he simply said that they didn’t and went on with it. The truth is that the Democrats (a majority of them) did reject God in a voice vote.

I know. He is the first anti-American President we’ve ever had. I sincerely hope that he is the last anti-American President that we have, but I do not trust the voters. Too many people vote based on their feelings rather than logic and reasonoing. Obama says all the right plattitudes. The fact that he ignores these plattitudes when he is formulating policy goes unremarked upon.

I amstill wondering how/why a man who was hearing voices and had paranoid delusions was wandering around the streets loose. He was clearly a danger to himself and others. That’s not just 20/20 hindsight. Someone who is having delusions so strongly that they are hearing voices is someone in need of medical intervention. He appears to have had enough presence of mind to actually seek therapy for this state, but he wasn’t hospitalized. I =know theye’ve made forcefull y comitting someone against their will hard, but this would seem to be an almost textbook case of someon ewho posed a risk. I say that becaus ehe’d had fits of temper so bad that he “blacked out” and shot up somebody’s car. Think he might shoot somebody? It would seem to be the next logical progression for his disease to take him.

Sarcasm is lost on the Left. They are a bunch of humorless fucks, the lot of them. And so self-righteous! They are perfect! It is no wonder that they worship Obama as a secular deity. He is everything they dream of in their “Perfect Man”. The fact that he is an utter failure acrtoss the board has no impact on these people.

Exactly. I recognize that comittal has a risk of abuse, but someone like this shouldn’t be allowed to just wander the streets. Not when he has a record of shooting things when he gets pissed. It isn’t any one thing that should have gotten him comitted, really, but the pattern that emerges when you look at his behavior over the years. And hearing voices is strong levels of delusion. 40 years ago that woul dhave been enough to get him comitted. People who are getting auditory hallucinations are people whoaare seriously mentally ill. He apparently sought treatment, and the system failed him. I am not sure what you do about that, though. There needs to be a movement back towards hospitalization of the seriously mentally ill, but ObaaCare is going to nix that, because psychiactric hospitalization costs money, and not a little of it. Psychiactric hospitalization isn’t a matter of putting them in the hospital for 72 hours. In cases like this, you may be talking abou ta hospitalization that will last months or even years.

He is indeed. And not a small fraction of his supporters view him that way. Not quite as many as did when he was elected in 2008, but a lot of these people believe. The fact that Obama has contimnued and even expanded on the emergency measures that Bush put into place simply doesn’t impact on them. The fact that Obama didn’t mean a damned thing by his so-called principled opposition to such policies is simply ignored.

This was a person who could not function in society. They should have put him in a mental institute and let him start a blog. You don’t see Charles Johnson going around doing this and he’s certifiable cray!

He is paranoid. He thinks Ron Paul is behind some Global 4th Reich plot. His is convinced that Glenn Greenwald is a Ron Paul lackey and trying to damage Obama to elect Rand Paul who will turn over the Presidency to his father. I wish I was joking, but that is what Charles believes.

Yeah, most of his base has stayed doggedly loyal to him. This in spite of the NSA spying and datamining, the continued operationof Gitmo, rendition, and the like. Obama has gone on to do almost exactly the same things that George Bush would have done in his place. Even when Bush was doing it, I was uneasy about it. Bush himself I trusted (and he didn’t abuse it, hyperventilations from the Left notwithstanding), but I was always worried about the next President. Power is something that should be grudgingly granted, and only under tightly controlled circumstances. If the potential for abuse is there, then likely the power will be abused by somebody.

Delusional. I am no fan of Ron Paul’s, but the man isn’t the “mastermind” behind some Illuminati Global Conspiracy. He wouldn’t make a good president, and I wouldn’t vote for him, but he is mostly just a moonbat among moonbats.

WASHINGTON (AP) – For President Barack Obama, an embarrassing diplomatic rebuke by Brazil has compounded an already troublesome stretch for the White House both at home and abroad.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff announced Tuesday that she was putting off a state visit to the U.S. next month to protest an American spy program that has aggressively targeted her nation’s government and private citizens alike.

Rousseff’s decision deepened the global fallout for Obama from revelations about National Security Agency surveillance programs, which have also angered many Americans. The announcement also came amid criticism of Obama’s public shifting over the threat of U.S. military action against Syria.

Some foreign policy analysts say such issues raise questions about Obama’s standing around the world.

“The real issue becomes, How does this affect American influence in the world?” said Carl Meacham, director of the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Is American influence knocked down a few notches as a result of this?” He called Rousseff’s action “almost unheard of.”

I’m not sure how much he’s damaged Obama, though. Some, certainly. Leftists can’t look at the NSA scansdal and claim that they’ve got everyone’s Right to Privacy ( a key component in Roe v. Wade) at heart. I might could even live with that if the Obama Administration were using tthis spying to catch terrorists, but that is clearly not what they are doing. If they’d been using this data to look fo rTerrorists, they would have discovered Nidal Hasan and Tamerlan Tsarnaev easily. The Russians warned us about Tsarnaev, and Hasan practically had “Islamic Jihadi” tattooed on his forehead. In both of these cases, there was tons of readily available information that should have been throwing up red flags (how, exactly, does a welfare recipient get the money together for broadening travel to Dagestan?). All of that was willfully ignored. No, Obama was using the NSA data for political purposes, just as he was using the IRS to go after his domestic enemies.

the city has prioritized the task of ensuring that all businesses are in compliance with its codes and permitting. To accomplish this, Mayor David Bing announced in January that he’d assembled a task force to execute Operation Compliance.

Operation Compliance began with the stated goal of shutting down 20 businesses a week. Since its inception, Operation Compliance has resulted in the closure of 383 small businesses, with another 536 in the “process of compliance,” according to figures provided to Reason TV by city officials.

theoutsider wrote:
A column by Jack Cashill? The guy that thinks President Obama’s father was Jimi Hendrix.Please???. Anybody that agrees with that theory, please post.
not true
You’re a typical low info voter.

I can see that. I linked an article in the Daily Mail (UK) yesterday that was the best unemotional synopsis of the Navy Yard shootings. It was really well done. And I reckon that the Daily Mail is basically a tabloid. I wouldn’t trust content from the BBC, though. The BBC makes PBS look like hard right-wingers.

Operation Compliance began with the stated goal of shutting down 20 businesses a week. Since its inception, Operation Compliance has resulted in the closure of 383 small businesses, with another 536 in the “process of compliance,” according to figures provided to Reason TV by city officials.

Objectively, it is hard to deny that the Democrats like a high unemployment rate. This is just a case in point. Instead of waiving onerous regulation to promote job creation, they are actively using hyperenforcement to decrease the number of available jobs. This is what the Democrats do. They want a majority of the people dependent on the government. That’s why Nancy Pelosie is so perky when she talks about record numbers on Food Stamps.

He’s done some damage. I don’t deny that. But it is difficult to pin down exactly how much damage has been done. We’ll know better next year after the election. If the Democrats lose the Senate and the House, I’d say that serious damage has been done to Obama by this. If the Dems re-take the House and hold the Senate, then the damage looks pretty minimal. I don’t really pay much attention to daily tracking polls and the like. Those scores can swing dramatically based on the news of the day, but the core of support, the voters who will really turn out, are what is important. We won’t have a realistic view of that until after next year’s election.

Unfortunately, the dead’s votes count as much as yours or mine. The Republicansreally dropped the ball after the 2000 elections. They should have gone full-bore “Count all the legal votes”. The Donks woul dhave had a hard time opposing Voter ID and the like in the aftermath of the contested election. You could make certain that the voting populace knew that the Democrats were relying on voter fraud to pad their numbers. They let that oppertunity slip through their fingers, and I am not sure why. The logical conclusion is that the Republicans don’t much care about voter fraud. It isn’t that we rely on it. Almost every case of voter fraud you hear abou tis fraud by the Democrats, and the Democrats famously stole Al Franken’s Senate Seat, but the Republicans don’t seem to care about this.

He gets taken seriously by teh MFM, whereas a Breitbart does not. I think that is why he’s been able to make this stick. Also, the American people recognize what a sign of out of control government this NSA datamining operation is. It really is Surveillance State Big Brotherism, and Americans aren’t comfortable with that. Oh, the Charles Johnsons of the world are comfortable with it, but the typical LIV correctly sees this kind of thing as a personal threat.

Oh dear oh dear… My NSA/FBI minders must have finally gotten around to reading my newest rant. My internet connection throughput has fallen no next to nothing… I must have really put somebodies Anthony Wiener into the meat grinder…

They can’t, their is a federal injunction that prevents them from doing so, it stems from a voter suppression verdict back in the 70’s. The federal judge who ruled, keeps coming out of retirement every couple of year to renew the injunction.

Really? That is interesting. Then the Republicans should be forcing this judge to defend his protecting fraudulent votes. There really is no question that voter fraud occurs, and that the fraud is almost exclusively from the Democrats’ side. I’m not aware of even one case where it was the Republicans comitting the fraud, but there might be one out there that I don’t know about. The Republicans should be fighting the Democrats’ “Culture of Corruption”, including Obama’s crony socialism, voter fraud, and the general pilliaging of the treasury by the Democrats and their supporters. One of the most frustrating things for me as a part of the Republican base is the cowardice of our so-called Leaders in taking the fight to the enemy. Politics is War. The Democrats get this. They live by it. The Republicans like to act like they are “abve” all that, but what that really does is let the Democrats define the scope and parameters of the discussion. “Republicans are racist” gets press, while the fact that more Democrats voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act than voted for it. We need to really fight.

Also, the American people recognize what a sign of out of control government this NSA datamining operation is. It really is Surveillance State Big Brotherism, and Americans aren’t comfortable with that. Oh, the Charles Johnsons of the world are comfortable with it, but the typical LIV correctly sees this kind of thing as a personal threat.

The Orcs in Mordor on the Potomac turned off the cities traffic camera’s and played prerecorded looped footage on 9/11/13 so that those now uncomfortable LIV’s would not see 1.2 million motorcyclists riding through Mordor on the Potomac protesting a Mus;lim Rally in Mordor on the Potomac on 9/11/13.

doriangrey wrote:
The Orcs in Mordor on the Potomac turned off the cities traffic camera’s and played prerecorded looped footage on 9/11/13
How did you find out about that? I found out because a friend of a friend works there and told my friend. There’s been NO media coverage.

ROTFLMAO… I finds out lots of stuffs… Just ask coldwarrior or Goldwaterite…

I’m a bit bewildered. Aaron Alexis went to MY range to buy his shotgun (the same one I bought on Iron Fist’s recommendation). As far as I can tell he did not have a permanent address here in Virginia – he’d been staying in hotels since he got here in mid-August so what kind of id did he present? I’m fairly certain the DMV will not issue an id of any kind based on a hotel room at the Marriott in Crystal City

Stranger than fiction. BHO gave himself a waiver on the law prohibiting arms to terrorists.
So, he will go ahead and arm Al Qaeda & other rebels in Syria. But he doesn’t want non criminal Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights.
And the MSM sees no irony?

You don’t have to be from the State to buy a long gun. His Texas ID would be sufficient for that. I am not sure about handguns. You used to could only buy handguns in your state of residence, but I don’t know if that is still the law. And under any circumstance, he could have bought either from a private seller and it would have been legal. The problem isn’t really in his procurement of the weapon. It is that a man who was having paranoid delusions and auditory hallucinations was wandering around the street to begin with.

Yeah, I linked that twice yeterday. It is really worse than that. Obama doesn’t want Martha Stewart to be able to buy a .22, but he will ship machineguns and explosives (maybe even surface to air missiles) to al Qaeda in Syria, and he doesn’t even require a photo ID. It isn’t hypocrisy. Obama is objectively on the terrorists side.

I’m a bit bewildered. Aaron Alexis went to MY range to buy his shotgun (the same one I bought on Iron Fist’s recommendation). As far as I can tell he did not have a permanent address here in Virginia — he’d been staying in hotels since he got here in mid-August so what kind of id did he present? I’m fairly certain the DMV will not issue an id of any kind based on a hotel room at the Marriott in Crystal City

I was actually wondering the same thing. In order to purchase long guns (rifles or shotguns) you don’t actually have to be a resident of the state. You can purchase them in adjacent states, so if he had drivers license with a DC address, that would have been okay. Handgun purchases can only be made in your state of residence.

The DMV isn’t supposed to issue drivers licenses based on hotel rooms, but it wouldn’t be unheard of. Colin Ferguson, the Long Island RR shooter, bought his gun in California using a boarding house as an address, and that was back when they had 2 full weeks to conduct background checks there.

Yeah, I linked that twice yeterday. It is really worse than that. Obama doesn’t want Martha Stewart to be able to buy a .22, but he will ship machineguns and explosives (maybe even surface to air missiles) to al Qaeda in Syria, and he doesn’t even require a photo ID. It isn’t hypocrisy. Obama is objectively on the terrorists side.

I don’t know how he gets to give himself a waiver on statutory law.
Maybe it’s legal, but it seems odd.

Oh hell, in California, to be FAIR to the homeless, San Francisco has set up phoney addresses so they can use them for ID cards. Of course, if we wanted to find them later for a criminal offense, it would be difficult. “Corner of Golden Gate and Taylow” would at least be accurate.

The Orcs in Mordor on the Potomac turned off the cities traffic camera’s and played prerecorded looped footage on 9/11/13

How did you find out about that? I found out because a friend of a friend works there and told my friend. There’s been NO media coverage.

I first heard about it when someone posted the screenshots of the traffic cameras on 9-11-13 over at Free Republic. (Plus I look at the cameras from time to time to see what’s going on in the old neighborhood.)

He has the discretion in the law itself, if the President deems it a matter of National Security. How, exactly, arming al Qaeda equates to helping American national security I am a little fuzzy on, but there really is no oversight powers for the congress for this. When the law was written, no one anticipated a Commander in Chief who would arm groups like al Qaeda.

You don’t have to be from the State to buy a long gun. His Texas ID would be sufficient for that. I am not sure about handguns. You used to could only buy handguns in your state of residence, but I don’t know if that is still the law.

You can buy a long gun in a state adjacent to your state of residence (what the ATF refers to as “contiguous” states). I can buy a rifle when I’m down in Raton taking a class at the Whittington Center, for example. But I can’t buy a handgun there, even though the state line is less than 20 miles away.

Didn’t someone refuse to sell him one because he was out of state? (now I’m really confused)

I haven’t seen that anywhere. I reckon that a gun shop can refuse to sell a gun to anyone they don’t want to. Saying that you had a bad feeling about a specific purchaser would be sufficient, I think. I don’t know what they’d do if a White Supremacist who owned a gun shop refused to sell to blacks, but they probably wouldn’t do anything in that circumstance. I know back in the ’90s New York was refusing all gun permits to blacks, and the NAACP was unconcerned with the practice.

Didn’t someone refuse to sell him one because he was out of state? (now I’m really confused)

I hadn’t heard that, but they might have. Not everyone is as familiar with the ins and outs of the law as they should be. And they might have used that as an excuse because they just didn’t want to sell him a gun, if he was really as crazy as it sounds.

He has the discretion in the law itself, if the President deems it a matter of National Security. How, exactly, arming al Qaeda equates to helping American national security I am a little fuzzy on, but there really is no oversight powers for the congress for this. When the law was written, no one anticipated a Commander in Chief who would arm groups like al Qaeda.

@ lobo91:
I thought the law was something like that. Just another hassel for people who want to buy a gun legally. I doubt seriously that it serves as an impediment to criminals. Just like the whole “waiting period” scam. It wasn’t about stopping crime. It was about inconveniencing the law abiding.

There are some states that have more restrictive laws, but that’s the federal law. They let you buy long guns in adjacent states because people often take hunting trips out of state, and if your gun breaks or something, you might want to buy a replacement.

Of course, someone might take a hunting trip to any state and have the same problem. If you want to hunt bighorn sheep, for example, you have to go to a state where they live. I guess the “contiguous state” thing was supposed to be some sort of compromise.

I’d like to go to Alaska and hunt brown bear or grizzlies. I think that would be a lot of fun. It sure would suck to get out on something like that and have your rifle break. I guess hunt guides would have loaners, but it would still suck. The worst thing about these kinds of laws is that they are just harassment of the law abiding, really. They don’t prevent crime, and aren’t really intended to prevent crime. They are put in place sloely to make it more difficult for the law abiding to legally purchase guns. In my opinion that makes them Unconstitutional. Harassing the law abiding isn’t a legitimate exercise of State power. SO far, though, the Supreme Court hasn’t agreed with me on that.

Virginia law does not prohibit the sale of assault rifles to out-of-state citizens who have proper identification,” Dan Peterson, a Virginia firearms attorney, told me Tuesday night. The required identification is proof of residency in another state and of U.S. citizenship, which can be items like a passport, birth certificate or voter identification card.

The Commonwealth defines “assault firearm” as any semiautomatic centerfire rifle or pistol with a magazine which will hold more than 20 rounds or can accommodate a silencer or is equipped with a folding stock.

That doesn’t really apply here, because the perpertrator used a pump shotgun. A pump shotgun isn’t usually considered an “Assault weapon”, though some specific automatic shotguns could possibly be considered that way (I’m thinking the SPAS 12 and LAW 12 may be). It is a specious designation, anyway. None of these weapons are “assault weapons” per the military definition of such things. They are semi-automatic weapons that bear a resemblance to real assault weapons, personal defense weapons, and the like, but none of them are capable for fully-automatic fire. The whole designation is simply a smoke screen. These weapons are almost never used in homicides. Obly about 3% of homicides in the United States are comitted with rifles of any type. There is absolutely no evidence that restricting these weapons based primarily on cosmetic appearances has any impact on violent crime, so there is no State issue at hand to justify abridging the Second Amendment in regards to such weapons. They just know that they can scare people with images of these weapons (often showing fully-automatic weapons firing and claiming that they are semi-automatic). They focus on “sporting purpose” and claim you can’t hunt with these weapons which is both false and really beside the point. The Second Amendment doesn’t say anything about duck hunting. Anyone that brings that up is lying to you.